


Growth

by Raven (singlecrow)



Category: Master and Commander - Patrick O'Brian
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-26
Updated: 2010-09-26
Packaged: 2017-10-12 05:28:43
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/121306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At twelve, Stephen knew the meanings of a great number of words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Growth

By the age of twelve, Stephen knew the meanings of a great number of words. Among them: _digitalis_ , which was from the Latin, named for the way the petals of the flower encased his fingers, neatly, to the first joint; _crepuscular_ , which was the blurred and interesting time before the nightfall; and _bastard_ , which was what they called him. Women came from the village with food on occasion, stepping in their long skirts through the paths towards the castle, and they murmured in Catalan, sometimes, but they were foreigners; they called him _bhudh_ , quietly, hiding the shape of their lips behind their hands.

Twenty years later and on the other side of the world Stephen would learn the word, would learn that it meant _ghost_ , and be pulled back as though anchored across the intervening time, to that summer with its intensity of colour, and see himself as through the eyes of another: see those young, pale eyes, that white face against the riot of greens and yellows, the rich black of gnarly oak, and be unsurprised. At that time he had been caught up in the strangeness of it all, and thought nothing of his own strangeness. He had been startled by kites, dazzled by sunshine, fascinated by tortoises, thirsty for knowledge, and for rain.

More years had passed than twenty before he asked, plaintively, "Why, Jack, do the men tell their tall tales on long, dark winter's nights? Do they not understand that this" – this was the Pacific in a becalming, blue below and above, colour that hurt one'e eyes to look at – "is by far more unnatural?"

And he spoke half in jest - "I was not aware the heat troubled you, Stephen," Jack said, no doubt with Stephen's less than naval view on the necessity of clothing in his mind – but with that dragging anchor pulling him back through time, to those first days, that eerie learning of the anatomy of heat. He had come from Ireland; he had found the sailing a trial to his stomach before he had found it a stimulus to his mind, and in these new ruins, found his attention shifting to each cardinal point in turn, drawn this direction and that by everything that swam and flew, fluttered and scuttled its way across the earth.

It was in that summer that he learned the meaning of _foreigner_ ; that in truth it was a meaningless term, that all had travelled somewhere to be where they were, and he was foreign himself, to himself, and to all around. He had been told of the castle before this journey, and had he listened that might have made it familiar to him, if it were not that at twelve, he had outgrown fairy stories.

Later, his godfather had laughed at his grubbings in the ground, his scratchings of notes, and called him, too, a small thing that scurried, but Stephen had laughed in return, knowing no insult was meant. Through ghostly summer nights he stalked bats, already grown too old to hear their calls, but patient enough to wait for the sweep of their wings on his cheek, and old enough to envy them that peace and freedom of flight. By day there were geckos, and flowers the like of which he had not seen. It was a world of dizzy and distant riches, to be studied and catalogued but also to be drunk in, handled as rich earth spilling through small hands. He had grown older in mere days and years in that place, Catalan replacing Irish as the quicker language on his lips, but it was also, in that place, that he had begun to be whom he would be.

Jack asked him, very much later, "When did you come by your interest in nature, Stephen? Was it as a boy?"

"Not now, Jack, I see my albatross" – but Stephen was thinking of summer, remembering that first time he had felt no fear of the creatures of the earth and sky, knowing himself a part of all he studied, knowing himself.


End file.
